BrunoMiranda.com

Here is something that may be crippling your agile project/team if you are not yet practicing it:

Story Based Customer Reviews

During the engineering meeting (you do have one of those right?) stories are assigned and to developer/s and prioritized. The developer must go back to the customer and obtain the requirements/specifications for said story (but that you already knew).

Once the developer has working code the must take it back to the customer for review and feedback. This is a crucial step that if skipped will hinder the process, delay stories and result in incomplete iterations. When an iteration is not fully completed due to reviews and feedback from the customer after the end of said iteration the entire project timeline will suffer.

I can’t emphasize how important getting customer feedback as soon as possible within the iteration is. Our team is partially distributed and so are our customers. After the request for feedback has been initiated, which is typically done by e-mail, the developer moves on the next story. Due to customer availability the feedback may take 2-3 days to come back at which point the developer has time to make necessary adjustments and is just about ready to submit the next story for customer review – keeping the project moving.

We have created a new state for stories in our PM tool called ‘Customer Review’. The predecessor state is ‘Open’ and from ‘Customer Review’ it will go to test (QA), with the requirement of the customer acceptance comment.

Open -> Customer Review -> Testing -> Done - > Done-Done

Done-Done happens after the iteration demo.